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The Harvard International Journal of Press Politics 5.2 (2000) 104-108



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The "Sweet Satisfactions" of Newspapering

Thomas W. Lippman


Stanley Walker would certainly have understood the scandal that rocked the Los Angeles Times last year. In fact, he virtually predicted it--more than sixty-five years ago.

"Few of the persons employed in the advertising department of any newspaper have any clear conception of the essentially different character of news and advertising," he wrote. Pressure from the advertising department to promote or protect the sources of a newspaper's revenue "is exerted constantly upon the news departments. If it isn't resisted, the newspapers will become pathetic harlots, headed for ruin."

Walker's observations were first published in 1934 in his classic book City Editor, a sharp-eyed, sharp-edged treatise about newspapers and the news business which was recently reissued by the Johns Hopkins University Press. As city editor of the New York Herald Tribune in the great era of competing daily papers, he was always alert to ethical pitfalls of the kind into which the Los Angeles Times tumbled.

Without informing the news department, the publisher of the Times entered into a revenue-sharing arrangement with the operators of Staples Center, a new sports arena. The paper devoted an entire issue of its Sunday magazine to the arena and split the advertising income with its proprietors. Revelation of the deal ignited a rebellion on the news staff and obliged the paper's bosses to acknowledge exactly the sort of ignorance of the news business that Walker described.

The subject of ethics is by no means the only one on which Walker's observations from the 1930s are still applicable. The striking feature of Walker's book is how much of it is directly relevant to the news business today. The pressure of deadlines, the thrill of the big story, and the sheer fun of the business--what Walker calls the "sweet satisfactions"--are still the driving power of the newsroom. Moreover, many of the issues Walker raised in City Editor--growing competition from electronic media (radio, in his day), the value of journalism schools, the tactics of public relations agents, the relative merits of journalistic generalists versus specialists, the struggle for brevity--are still on the agenda in every newsroom. He wanted writing to be "clear, vigorous and informative." Today's editors pursue the same goal.

"Because a story is important, it doesn't follow that it must be long," Walker notes. How many times in my newspapering life did I hear that? I heard [End Page 104] it in my first summer as a copy boy at the New York Times in 1959, and in my last year of active duty, writing the Kosovo War story for the Washington Post, in 1999; and in one form or another I heard it every year in between. Reporters resisted those exhortations in 1934, and they still resist them, always trying to hold on to the extra column inches that provide room for one more good quote, one more anecdote. It was said of Milton Bracker, the last green-eyeshade rewrite man at the New York Times, that he cared as much about the three-paragraph short as about the major story, but such an attitude was rare then, and it is rare now.

Atmospherically and socially, of course, the world of newspaper journalism has changed immensely since Stanley Walker's day. Newsroom behavior, management practices, and racial attitudes that were prevalent then would not be tolerated now. His was a newsroom populated almost entirely by white males (who always wore hats when they went out) and infused with tough-guy attitudes. Walker notes the trend toward better educated and better behaved reporters had already begun in 1934--"somehow it isn't fashionable anymore, or even very amusing, to be gone on a drunk for a week when important news is breaking"--but everyone still wanted to be known as "hard-boiled."

The "consistently brutal curmudgeon" who terrorized the newsroom in Walker's era (and well into mine) would...

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